High-dimensional robot dynamic trajectory planning poses many challenges for traditional planning algorithms. Existing planning methods suffer from issues such as long computation times, limited capacity to address intricate obstacle models, and lack of consideration for external disturbances and measurement inaccuracies in these high-dimensional systems. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel trajectory planning approach that combines Dynamic Control Barrier Function (DCBF) with a disturbance observer to create a Robust Dynamic Control Barrier Function (RDCBF) planner. This approach successfully plans trajectories in environments with complex dynamic obstacles while accounting for external disturbances and measurement uncertainties, ensuring system safety and enabling precise obstacle avoidance. Experimental results on a mobile manipulator demonstrate outstanding performance of the proposed approach.

Exactly estimating and tracking the motion of surrounding dynamic objects is one of important tasks for the autonomy of a quadruped manipulator. However, with only an onboard RGB camera, it is still a challenging work for a quadruped manipulator to track the motion of a dynamic object moving with unknown and changing velocities. To address this problem, this manuscript proposes a novel image-based visual servoing (IBVS) approach consisting of three elements: a spherical projection model, a robust super-twisting observer, and a model predictive controller (MPC). The spherical projection model decouples the visual error of the dynamic target into linear and angular ones. Then, with the presence of the visual error, the robustness of the observer is exploited to estimate the unknown and changing velocities of the dynamic target without depth estimation. Finally, the estimated velocity is fed into the model predictive controller (MPC) to generate joint torques for the quadruped manipulator to track the motion of the dynamical target. The proposed approach is validated through hardware experiments and the experimental results illustrate the approach's effectiveness in improving the autonomy of the quadruped manipulator.

Aerial manipulators are composed of an aerial multi-rotor that is equipped with a 6-DOF servo robot arm. To achieve precise position and attitude control during the arm's motion, it is critical for the system to have high performance control capabilities. However, the coupling effect between the multi-rotor UAVs' movement poses a challenge to the entire system's control capability. We have proposed a new proxy-based super twisting control approach for quadrotor UAVs that mitigates the disturbance caused by moving manipulators. This approach helps improve the stability of the aerial manipulation system when carrying out hovering or trajectory tracking tasks. The controller's effectiveness has been validated through numerical simulation and further tested in the Gazebo simulation environment.